Talking about something as big and diverse as Europe will inevitably highlight some countries/policies and completely ignore others. And I will be mostly focusing on western europe because that’s the part I’m familiar with, so eastward up to Germany and Austria. I expect eastward countries are much of the same, especially if they’re in the EU, but like I said it would be ignorant for me to speak about them. Finally, this takes into account non-EU countries. It’s not just the EU. Frankly, I feel like when it comes to things like this, the EU has very little to do with it.

What is Europe’s actual energy policy?

To decide to overpay on underperforming energy ‘solutions’ just because they come from the US.

You saw it with the Nordstream pipeline. It got blown up, and Germany said they wouldn’t rebuild it. Now they buy LNG from the US. Daddy US said “no more russian energy, son” and we said yes dad. our fucking politicians are clowns, literal dorks who stumble over every other word because they know they can’t defend any of these policies. Remember the “sometimes daddy has to get angry” guy? Some EU dork or something. Nobody voted for him, nobody knows how he got there, but apparently he gets to make policy for literally almost 1 billion people.

Despite that nuclear energy is among the greenest energy you could have, we have almost no nuclear policy or research happening. AFAIK France is the only one still relying on nuclear (ie not phasing it out), because they can still get cheap blood uranium from their ex-not-so-ex-colonies in West Africa.

You are not allowed to install A/C despite heat records being broken year after year since 2020 - it is currently hotter in a vast part of France and Spain than it is in the Sahara Desert! And yet, hospitals, schools, retirement homes and other places

In some places, you are not even allowed to install A/C because the building is “protected”. In others, you need a permit or you need to have solar - policies designed to discourage people from wanting to install A/C.

However you can absolutely buy a portable unit, the ones with the hose. These are not efficient, both in terms of cooling capacity and electricity use, but they’re allowed without restrictions. Make it make sense.

Meanwhile we happily offload our production to China on the cheap to sell back to our consumers for over triple the price, and China bears the brunt of this offshoring.

If they do have A/C, there are huge barriers to how they can use it. Can’t have it go too low (which in practice means “barely 2-4 degrees lower than the sweltering outside temp”, not “maybe don’t go down to 18C when it’s 35 outside”), can’t have it on the whole time, etc.

It’s incredible that the best answer this entire cohort of elected politicians can find to people fucking dying from the weather is “open the windows and drink water :)”

I promise you they don’t just ‘open the windows and drink water’ at the WEF forum in Davos lol. Judging by the pictures they have some cool A/C in there.

Every year we break new records and then you still have the reactionary bots saying “it’s just summer shut up”. A sentiment echoed by our politicians, considering state policy is literally just to ignore the problem. One thing I don’t like is framing that it has to get ‘too hot’ to justify taking actual measures against the heat. It’s well-intentioned, but we’re not machines. It’s like, when we started getting what they call ‘tropical nights’ - which is when temps go >30C during the day and don’t get below 20C during the night, and is another euphemism meant to gaslight us into believing this is normal and other people just deal with it - that wasn’t enough. That was “normal”. Now we’re getting temps higher than the Sahara desert and it’s still ‘not enough’ to justify taking measures. It’s still just business as usual.

Every year people die during the heatwaves btw. Easily remedied by having A/C (you can probably tell I’m getting tired of the heatwave and want to install A/C).

But it’s not just the heat. We promote solar but have no incentives for it. We block cheap Chinese solar panels in ALL of Europe, and have done so since they started getting cheap around the turn of the 21st century. It’s wild that if we had embraced cheap solar in the 2000s, every fucking home in Europe would be equipped with solar by now.

There is literally no reason to bear the cost of installing solar when it’s so expensive and you won’t recoup it for 20 years! Friends installed solar and installed an inverter to sell the electricity back to the grid, on their own money, and a year later the company said they won’t buy surplus electricity anymore. Now this inverter is literally sitting there in their home doing nothing.

If you rent, obviously your landlord doesn’t care about putting your money into solar, A/C, or a heat pump. It’s not their home, they don’t care. They don’t live in it when it gets to 33C in the bedroom.

We block chinese EVs because our companies (read: US companies that we personally identify with) can’t compete. We keep stressing, at the national level, how important it is to install solar and go green and stop fossil fuels, and then do fucking none of that.

Meanwhile energy costs keep rising, and instead of taking off some of the pressure from the homes and families that have to pay the price, we send that money to “Israel” to literally pollute Gaza as policy, to render it uninhabitable. The US army remains the biggest fucking polluter on the planet. CEOs go to their meetings in a private jet. But don’t forget to use paper straws to offset it! And would you like to contribute 2 euros to carbon credits with your order?

Energy costs are supposed to rise though, that’s the point. Fucking 30 cents for your kilowatt-hour. This is a mechanism to force people to consume less electricity. Don’t need to upgrade the grid if people stop using power taps temple. That’s our policy - price you out of using electricity so we can then say we are carbon neutral. Greens cheer for this. Mission accomplished.

Then because we don’t produce electricity to meet demand, we just import German coal energy instead of producing local green electricity. Look it up, if you live anywhere close to Germany (or not), you probably buy from there.

Don’t forget to sort your cardboard from your paper though you fucking neanderthal. I hope you feel ashamed that you threw the lid of the yoghurt cup away in the general bin instead of sorting it. If we all did it (which we have never done in the history of ever), then that would solve the problem! Meanwhile USians sleep with the A/C turned to freezing temps to the point they have to use a blanket. Yeah, that’s gonna put a dent in the CO2.

There is very little industry left in Europe, Germany and France seem to be the only ones left - and France is really not an example lol, but at least they took ~some steps to retain some of that. So we produce nothing, we just consume, and then somehow gaslight ourselves into thinking that’s sound economic policy.

It’s not just the individual ‘comfort’ (a euphemism to say “die in a ditch peasant, BP needs its profits”). Public services are getting shittier every year, and they have been getting worse for the past 15 years, ever since I started keeping track of it. A huge part of it is privatization efforts that happen slowly, over time.

And then we wonder why people turn to the right such as Reform in the UK or Rassemblement National in France.

These people are demagogues. They are opportunists of the highest order, who will say whatever then do the opposite with no shame.

But they’re winning the public over. Why? Because they don’t admonish the masses for wanting ‘comfort’ in unlivable conditions. Yes, the truth is that people such as Farage or Le Pen have a material incentive to deny climate change due to their ties to the bourgeoisie, and they have decided that the best way to swallow the pill is class collaborationism - it’s okay that BP gets to commit an oil spill in your water, because YOU get to do it too :)

But if the best we can offer is a resounding “maybe you should just die, the climate is more important than your life” – then don’t get surprised when that doesn’t resonate and people start moving to the right.

Basically the people that need to hear this criticism are not the same people that are on the receiving end of it.

The extent of the left’s energy policy is ‘idk i guess we degrow?’. They have plans on the economy and ‘stimulus packages’, but that’s all they offer. Seriously, look it up. Chances are they don’t say anything about disability. Energy is barely a paragraph in my party programme (it’s not really ‘my’ party anymore, but it’s still one I keep an eye on and somewhat identify with, from a distance). They still promote abandoning nuclear and somehow finding a magical way to abandon fossil fuels by 2050. The reason they don’t detail a plan to transition out of fossil fuels is because they expect the government in power will have to do it. It’s not unheard of. But it doesn’t inspire confidence either. First because you trust those successive governments to do it properly, second because… you’re not offering anything. And you want some magical solution that doesn’t use nuclear lol okay. And you don’t mention stopping tariffs on China so we can get their green know-how and goods. Don’t forget to vote for us tho! We have solutions (alleged)!

and the programme has no solution to the climate change that we are experiencing. what little they have on the climate is “capitalism won’t solve climate change”. Yes, that’s true. But you’re still just ignoring the problems that climate change is causing right here and now, and you offer nothing to face it. I feel like something simple like “hospitals and care homes are allowed to run whatever AC they want and consume as much water as they need or people will die” is a start. Just throwing that out there.

Socialism is not pauperism. And yet, that’s the state of the ‘radical left’ in europe. I call this the cult of mediocrity, personally. The idea that ‘proper’ socialism comes at a cost. That anything that is all good, no drawbacks, is somehow suspicious or undesirable. Oh, there will be issues in socialism, including labor and social ones. But they’re too far for us to imagine, living under capitalism, so we promote some Mother Theresa shit.

Get your head out of the gutter and start building real socialism, not just band-aid solutions that make some hippies think they’re doing something.

And I’m not even going into the pea-sized brain defense ‘policies’ of this shithole continent. Such as continuing to buy US defense systems that have been proven completely unable to stop new tactics as seen by Hezbollah and Iran, or NATO still refusing to entertain drone warfare as a reality. We send money and weapons to Ukraine and then the average citizen gets told to ‘toughen up’ for the fucking nazis in ukraine.

Switzerland bought the brand new F-36 planes for billions. You know, the one that doubles as a submersible when it feels like it. Years later, they’re still waiting for them. You can’t even repair some of the components yourself if you purchase US defense, you have to fly in a US tech. Then, Switzerland also decided this was the perfect business partner to buy a Patriot missile system from for… reasons, I guess? Guess what - they’re still waiting on it because apparently Ukraine and “Israel” need them more. You know, the Patriot system that was shown it can’t do anything against drones which are being used right now in Ukraine. But it’s vitally important that they raise taxes more (VAT specifically) to fund these things that they still haven’t received. that’s a reliable business decision apparently.

Again, the fucking far-right has a distance on us there. While we split parties over who to support in the war (true story), they just come out and say “we should focus on our own people [a euphemism to mean crackers of course], let ukraine fight its own battle”. Again, they’re demagogues. They don’t care, and they don’t believe it. They will give this money to Ford or Bayer. But they offer a plausible-sounding solution. There is 0 confidence in someone that says “I can’t explain it to you, you wouldn’t understand. But Ukraine needs all our weapons and money. No we didn’t consult you, we knew you’d understand haha. Just hand over your wallet and stop making a fuss”.

You know what they’re saying over in France? I saw the story just this morning. The RN wants subsidies so people can install A/C during this major heatwave. The left is still divided over whether it’s “necessary” or not to have AC. A unit is over 1000€, and installation costs are easily 2000€. The rest of the world has already made this choice lol; everyone in East Asia has A/C.

It’s no surprise only socialist countries actually reach their climate targets, and consistently.

Frankly I worry for this continent. In 20 years time we’ll be back to the fucking stone age if this keeps going, and I’m not sure what it’s gonna look like then. We’ll die in 50C weather for “Israel” or something. It’s like they want us to all fucking die.

There might be unfinished sentences in here lol. that’s the best I can do.